Leaderboard Zone

I won’t get into the whole song and dance behind Dipsie. I posted on the company back in early November, and for a while it was one of the most searched terms on the site, as it seemed to promise That Which We All Long For, which is to say, The Next Google.

I spent some time over the past few months talking to folks about Dipsie, and have in fact been quite close to posting Real News about the company at one point or another. But as with many startups working through the inevitable kinks, the Real News never quite materialized. Now, Gary posts that Dipsie has told the Chicago Sun Times that it will launch its public beta on May 10. There’s no other news in this piece, but it does reflect the bravado of founder Jason Weiner. As Gary says, let’s see what happens in May. We can all hope, of course. But me, I’m a skeptic. Prove me wrong, Jason; I’d love to be wrong….

This wonderful form filling spider sounds like something straight out of O’Reilly’s “Spidering Hacks” book. Most of the sites that use form based selection do so because they are database backed and have time sensitive data that is continually changing. Thus filling out a form will give a snapshot of data. Now with forms with a lot of variables, what Dipsie would be doing is effectively downloading that site’s database. But more surprisingly, what Dipsie has been blowing about in the press releases is not that remarkable or revolutionary. Price comparison websites have being doing this kind of thing for the last few years.

I don’t think that anyone has seen the Dipsie bot in their logs. Maybe it is operating in stealth mode in order to pretend to be an average user on all those forms/database backed websites. Then again it may just be vapourware. The technology required to spider the web on an ongoing basis and provide search results will require considerable investments as will hiring the people with the expertise and abilities to make such an operation run.

I’d like to see new developments in search engine technology but I would not hold my breath for Dipsie’s May beta. As for the patent-pending claims – that should be easily verifiable on another form based interface on a database backed website – http://www.uspto.gov